unknown soldiers – At Manila American Cemetery, about 2,900 U.S. service members still lie as “comrades in arms known but to God.” For Jim Knudsen, whose uncle Julius St. John Knudsen vanished in 1942 during the Bataan Death March, the Pentagon’s system moves with promise—and he
When Jim Knudsen thinks about his uncle Julius, he doesn’t picture a distant war. He pictures a grave marker with no name.
At the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig, the headstones for the unidentified do not carry ranks, branches, or dates of death. Each grave marker bears the same inscription: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.”
About 2,900 American service members are still buried as “unknowns” in that cemetery. Many are soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen whose remains were recovered after World War II but could not be identified with the science available at the time.
For Knudsen, 75, the unknown has a name and a timeline. Julius St. John Knudsen. an Army Technician 5th Class and a 25-year-old tanker. vanished in 1942 in the Philippines during the Bataan Death March. He was a member of the U.S. Army’s 194th Tank Battalion, and he disappeared in 1942 during the death march.
Knudsen has carried the search for 17 years. A Minnesota resident, he tracked down military records and contacted distant relatives to submit DNA samples. He studied wartime maps and interviewed the last surviving soldier from his uncle’s tank battalion. keeping a promise he made to his father in 2009.
“Rest easy,” Knudsen told his father when he went into hospice care. “I’ll keep looking for Julius.”
Earlier this year, Knudsen believed the mystery might finally be solved through forensic DNA science. The case. like so many in the Pentagon’s work of accounting for missing Americans. illustrates what families say is the hardest part: not just the uncertainty. but how long it can last even after action begins.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency says there are still more than 80,000 U.S. service members unaccounted for since World War II, and it estimates that 38,000 are recoverable. In fiscal year 2025. the agency identified the remains of 231 service members—the highest number ever for the DPAA or its predecessor agencies.
Knudsen’s timeline is shaped by that uneven pace. The agency’s disinterments and identifications have progressed. but at the current pace of cemetery disinterments. identifying all of the unknowns in cemeteries would take more than three decades. Even then, the wait doesn’t end when remains leave the ground. Knudsen says that after remains are sent to laboratories for analysis, the timeline can stretch for years.
“My grandkids will be having kids before they identify my uncle,” Knudsen said. “And that’s not right.”
In late January. 18 caskets containing the remains of unidentified soldiers killed in the Philippines during World War II were flown to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in late January. After a solemn Honorable Carry ceremony, the remains were sent to the DPAA’s Honolulu lab. Knudsen is hopeful that one of those caskets contains the remains of Julius.
The steps toward that moment weren’t instantaneous. It took several years for Knudsen and a military researcher to convince the Pentagon’s MIA agency to exhume the remains of nine American soldiers recovered after World War II along the route of the death march. The process. which involves careful decisions about what can be disturbed and when. produced a narrow opening—one that families describe as both hopeful and still cruelly slow.
The human stakes sit inside a policy and scientific dispute that has taken years to play out.
Forensic DNA experts who agree with Knudsen’s frustration argue the Pentagon’s process still relies on an approach built for an earlier era. Edwin Huffine. a prominent forensic DNA scientist who served in leadership roles at the elite Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory from 1994 to 1999. said the main obstacle is bureaucratic inertia. Huffine argued the Pentagon could accelerate identifications with a robust plan aimed at identifying all 6. 050 service members in years rather than decades.
Huffine said the Pentagon relies too heavily on slower forensic methods such as skeletal analysis and historical reconstruction. instead of letting DNA drive identifications. He argued that state-of-the-art nuclear DNA testing and wider use of forensic genealogy—similar to how law enforcement uses DNA to crack cold cases—could speed up identification of thousands of unknowns.
That debate is at the center of a broader question: how to honor unidentified World War II and Korean War service members in a time when DNA technology can unlock identities once thought to be lost forever.
Kelly McKeague. a retired Air Force major general who has been the director of the DPAA since 2017. ruled out a dramatic surge in disinterments. McKeague defended the current system for identifying the unknowns. saying it blends science. military history. and the responsibility of disturbing graves only when investigators believe there’s a strong chance of finding answers.
He said a massive disinterment campaign would destroy the sanctity of America’s military cemeteries and that the DPAA lacks the laboratory capacity for such an effort. McKeague pointed to a signature project: the disinterment of the remains of sailors and Marines killed on the battleship USS Oklahoma during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
After the war, 394 servicemen killed aboard USS Oklahoma were buried as unknowns in 61 caskets in the Punchbowl. McKeague said most of the caskets contained commingled remains, and “One casket alone had 95 different individuals.”
The DPAA exhumed the remains of all the sailors and spent six years using forensic anthropology. dental analysis. and advanced DNA testing to separate and identify them. Of the 394 servicemen. 362 have been identified and their remains were returned to their families for reburial with military honors in the cemeteries of their choice.
McKeague said the DPAA has adopted a similar strategy for the 862 Korean War unknowns buried at the Punchbowl.
He said the average length of time between the arrival of remains at the DPAA lab and formal identification is three to four years, with some cases closed in as little as a few weeks and others requiring many years to solve.
When asked what he would say to MIA families hoping for quicker answers, McKeague said generational grieving often appears when the DPAA updates families at regular meetings around the country. “We understand, we empathize, and we’re doing everything possible” to alleviate that suffering, he said.
For Knudsen, the Pentagon’s process isn’t abstract. His uncle, for most of Knudsen’s life, was more memory than record.
Julius Knudsen was the fun-loving prankster from Brainerd, Minnesota. He walked on stilts in parades, entered beard-growing contests, and rode an Indian motorcycle to California during the Great Depression before joining the California Army National Guard in 1941.
“Dad never talked about it,” Knudsen said.
The Knudsen family’s last known photo of Julius was taken in 1941 at the summit of Oregon’s Mt. McKenzie during a visit with his aunt Dagmar Knudsen, before he shipped out to the Philippines.
In the 1980s. Knudsen’s father. Wilbur. began searching for answers by writing letters to Congress and the Pentagon but ran into dead ends. Officials repeatedly told him that most of his older brother’s records had likely been destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Burned out and frustrated, Wilbur stopped searching.
Years later, when Knudsen resumed the hunt, he had internet tools his father never possessed. After cycling through two Army casualty officers, he was assigned Charles Johnson, who became his steady guide through the bureaucracy.
Knudsen tracked down distant relatives and asked them to submit DNA samples to the Pentagon’s Delaware DNA lab as he pieced together Julius’s wartime path. He learned Julius transferred from the California Army National Guard to join 63 other Brainerd men in Company A of the Army’s 194th Tank Battalion—one of the first mechanized units sent to defend the Philippines before Japan began attacking the island nation within hours of bombing Pearl Harbor.
After the fall of Bataan in April 1942, Julius joined 75,000 American and Filipino troops on the Bataan Death March. Army records initially suggested he died at the Cabanatuan POW camp. but secret camp records kept by American prisoners showed he never arrived there or at Camp O’Donnell. the end point of the 65-mile march.
In 2019, Knudsen sought help from Colorado MIA researcher John Bear, who located the diaries of Julius’s commander, Lt. Col. Ernest Miller. Miller wrote that Julius was last seen near the city of Lubao. Knudsen then interviewed Walt Straka, the last surviving Brainerd tanker, a year before Straka died at 101 in 2021.
Straka told Knudsen he believed Julius was among a group of POWs who ran into the woods south of Lubao, and said some marchers reported hearing gunshots in the area where the men had fled.
Bear later found Army maps showing a cluster of wartime graves in a banana field near Lubao. Greg Kupsky. the DPAA’s lead World War II historian for the Philippines. then connected the site to the remains of nine unidentified soldiers recovered after the war and eventually buried at the Manila American Cemetery.
Kupsky assembled a list of candidates that included Julius and 151 other soldiers. Before approving a disinterment, the DPAA requires DNA reference samples from relatives tied to at least 60% of those possible matches—a threshold that took Bear and Army genealogists until 2023 to reach.
In April 2024. top Pentagon officials gave approval for workers to exhume the remains of the nine soldiers and nine others from the Manila cemetery. The DPAA and the American Battle Monuments Commission, which manages 26 military cemeteries overseas, then worked together to schedule the disinterments.
The 18 caskets were exhumed in December 2025 and sent the next month to the DPAA’s Honolulu lab.
Knudsen was elated—until he learned the identification process could still take years due to laboratory backlogs. In a Jan. 26 email. Charles Johnson wrote to Knudsen: “So this is the part of the ID process where patience will be the most difficult. ” adding that the DPAA has thousands of remains to process and an internal hierarchy that prioritizes cases.
That is where Huffine’s argument lands.
Huffine said there’s no reason families like the Knudsens should be waiting so long. During his time at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory. he helped pioneer mitochondrial DNA testing. which became the backbone of early military identifications. He also tied his views to what he learned working on identification in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In 1999, Huffine quit his AFDIL job to join the International Commission on Missing Persons after the Bosnian war. He was asked to help solve the identification challenge after Bosnian Serb forces massacred tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians and POWs and then tried to hide the evidence by digging up mass graves and reburied victims elsewhere. using bulldozers to scatter and conceal bodies.
Huffine said that when he arrived 27 years ago, there were 4,000 bodies and only seven had been identified in three years.
He said mitochondrial DNA testing produced results but created a major problem because mitochondrial DNA passes only from mothers to their children. Large groups of related victims share the same genetic signature, especially when extended families are slaughtered together.
So Huffine described an inversion of the system—making nuclear DNA the first step rather than the last. He said his team built a database of family reference samples and tested every viable bone to try to find a genetic match. Within two years, the system identified about 500 individuals a month.
“They need to do DNA testing first. Then have everything else confirm it,” Huffine said.
Huffine argued that a similar approach could identify most of the 6,050 unknowns in U.S. military cemeteries in several years if Congress allocates more money for DNA testing and more testing is outsourced to private labs.
He said it would not require permanently turning cemeteries into excavation sites. He described tightly controlled operations using temporary shielding, mobile DNA laboratories, and CT scanners near cemetery grounds. Remains could be exhumed, scanned, sampled for DNA, and reburied quickly while forensic anthropologists and geneticists analyze data later.
McKeague, for the DPAA, said the lab’s process already begins with DNA on large projects. He said it is standard for the lab to start large cases—ones with commingled remains—with DNA analysis, and that the blended approach happens concurrently while samples are processed.
When “sufficient information” from a DNA-led approach allows identification, McKeague said it is done once the data are validated. He said best practice for identifying large groups of poorly preserved skeletonized remains is to use a diverse toolkit with DNA as a key component.
He said forensic anthropologists routinely remove fingernail-sized slivers of bone from remains soon after they arrive at the DPAA lab, and then the bone samples are sent to the Delaware lab for immediate analysis.
But Huffine said the issue is not whether DNA is used at the beginning of the process; it is how much weight the agency gives the science. He argued the DPAA’s blended approach still leans too heavily on anthropology. history. and other forensic disciplines rather than allowing DNA to drive identifications.
“Always use your strongest science first,” he said.
Geneticist David Mittelman. CEO and co-founder of Texas-based Othram Inc. agreed that “DNA should lead the investigation.” Mittelman said his lab specializes in extracting hard-to-get DNA from degraded and damaged bones. embalmed tissue. and even century-old remains. He said traditional forensic identification relies on testing roughly 20 genetic markers—useful for confirming a suspected identity when no close family DNA sample exists—but often ineffective when remains are badly degraded.
Mittelman said his scientists analyze hundreds of thousands of markers to identify distant relatives and reconstruct identities through genealogical networks, which he calls “identity inference.”
The disagreement also extends to how DNA is interpreted.
A 2018 arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo. the Golden State Killer. helped transform forensic genetics and brought attention to forensic investigative genetic genealogy. California investigators used GEDmatch to search for distant genetic relatives of DeAngelo—in some cases. third or fourth cousins—and genealogists then built family trees until they narrowed the search to DeAngelo. a former California police officer who later pleaded guilty to 13 murders and dozens of rapes committed in the 1970s and 1980s.
Michelle Leonard. described as a genetic genealogy pioneer in the United Kingdom. said public DNA databases such as GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA should be treated as investigative resources rather than standalone identification systems. She said paired with DNA testing and traditional genealogy research. the databases can generate leads. narrow family trees. and point investigators toward possible relatives in missing-person cases.
“FIGG isn’t magic,” Leonard said. “But it’s a very powerful tool.”
Leonard said the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory primarily relies on a closed DNA system built around samples voluntarily submitted by relatives of missing service members, which genetic genealogists say can limit potential matches in long-unsolved cases.
“It would certainly be possible to identify more soldiers if genetic genealogy could be used as an add-on to the regular methods,” she said.
In written responses to questions from The War Horse, AFDIL defended its cautious approach. The laboratory statement said it does not use publicly available databases for family references. arguing those databases lack quality controls required for forensic identifications. The lab acknowledged it was developing strategies to incorporate FIGG because its results have proved promising.
Tom Osypian. associate director and product manager at GEDmatch. said public DNA databases and FIGG are not substitutes for traditional forensic identification databases. and that they are “meant to accelerate” IDs. Osypian said. “We don’t do the DNA testing at GEDmatch. ” and that GEDmatch has processes to make sure uploaded data is robust as possible.
At the heart of the dispute is grief—experienced in real time, not in policy memos.
McKeague said advocates of stepped-up disinterments underestimate the emotional and cultural weight of disturbing gravesites holding America’s war dead. “These are not just cases,” he said. “These are our fallen.”
Huffine described the personal pressure behind his focus. In 1995, his father disappeared during a drive and did not return home. Authorities found his body several days later. Huffine said that even during that uncertainty, he came to understand “what just not knowing can do to someone.”
On the ground, the pace of disinterments is also physically bounded. David Americo. Paris-based chief of cemetery operations for the American Battle Monuments Commission. said under an agreement with the DPAA. the current limit is 100 disinterments a year at the Manila American Cemetery and 75 annually across Europe. Americo said the staff would work in good faith with DPAA officials if the decision is made to accelerate.
Americo said disinterments are carefully managed to minimize disruption to the cemeteries and the families who visit them. He said headstones must be temporarily removed and sod cut away, and that freshly disturbed earth can remain visible for weeks as the grounds heal.
He said he understands the need to balance the beauty of cemeteries and the MIA families’ pressing need for closure.
Americo ended an interview by recounting his first disinterment witnessed at the Florence American Cemetery in Italy after joining the commission in 2017. He said he watched in awe as a casket was opened and he saw the remains of a young American who had given his life for his country. “probably 18. 19. 20 years old.” He said U.S. soldiers carried the casket away from the grave with military honors before it was transported to the DPAA’s forensic lab. and that moment remains with him.
For families like Knudsen, that balancing act is measured in years they cannot get back.
The Manila American Cemetery’s Tablets of the Missing memorialize 36,286 service members who were listed as missing or were buried at sea during World War II.
And under the white marble crosses—amid Stars of David and name-less markers—the question persists in quiet lines: how many more generations will pass before “unknowns” become the named people they were always meant to be?
Reporting for this War Horse investigation was supported by the Pulitzer Center. The story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.
DPAA Pentagon Manila American Cemetery unknown soldiers Bataan Death March forensic DNA MIA families congressional funding Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory Othram FIGG USS Oklahoma Punchbowl American Battle Monuments Commission